Posts Tagged ‘Bohemia’

Arma 3 [official site] has a nice approach to paid DLC. When makers Bohemia Interactive sell new odds and ends for cash money, they’ve also released free updates adding related extras for all.

This week they released the shooty Marksmen DLC, which adds more guns, scopes, ghillie suits, firing drills, and other things that go ‘bang!’ They also rolled out a hearty patch which improves the fundamentals of how guns work, and adds new bits and pieces including a scenario focused on feeling cool rolling around firing guns from moving vehicles. Heaven help me, I do enjoy shooty vehicle sections in games.

Which is good, because the last thing anyone wants is an unstable cannibal.

My complete personal experience of DayZ can be summed up with “ran around in the dark, got attacked by some zombies, panicked and ran away, managed to lose them before bleeding to death in a churchyard”. I never did well enough to become intimate with the game’s gory innards, and as such its patch and changelog notes are largely a mystery to me. Fortunately they’re still almost as entertaining as, er, bleeding out whilst cowering behind a gravestone.

First the bad news: DayZ was absolutely, definitely hacked. That happened. After an initial period of being cosigned to Reddit rumor status, Bohemia’s confirmed to RPS that DayZ’s servers were compromised in some significant form or fashion. Initial reports pegged the hack attack as a full-on swiping of source code (which will also be the title of George R.R. Martin’s eventual cyberpunk novel after Game of Thrones takes his life and he returns as a nano-borg), but Bohemia has yet to enter panic mode. Instead, a rep told me that both players and development of the game are completely unaffected.

Bohemia have accomplished what real life scientists and government funding bodies cannot – exploration and colonisation sim Take On Mars now features a manned mission. I hadn’t realised that the previous build of the Early Access version only allowed players to send a probe to the puce planet, but that’s no longer the case.

Today’s update lands the first human marsonauts to Take On Mars. With access to a manned science buggy, featuring an interactive 3D GUI, one of their first objectives will be to explore the huge new Cydonia Mensae location, which spans 8×8 kilometer of Martian terrain. A 3D printer enables marsonauts to construct various parts, which can be put together via the Habitat Construction System to form buildings and installations.

The term ‘marsonauts’ dropped in among the other words makes me instinctively shudder, as if I were looking at a sea of human faces and suddenly spotted a Brundlefly.

A more hysterical headline would have suggested that Bohemia have doubled the size of DayZ’s team in anticipation of the loss of Dean Hall, the creator of the multiplayer survival game. That’s not the case – I have it on good authority* that Bohemia are actively gathering strands of Hall’s hair and traces of saliva from his favourite coffee mug in order to create a functional clone. The team is expanding though and will be focusing on survival mechanics. Which makes sense, given that DayZ is a survival game.

Universe: “I have become known for doing at least one thing no one will ever see coming per day. For example, at the dawn of time, it was existing. Last week, it was Miley Cyrus doing a halfway decent cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” I must keep all beings sentient and otherwise on their toes (and otherwise).”

Pinky: “Gee Universe, what are we going to do tonight?”

Universe: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky… actually, I hadn’t thought about it. Wow. I’m really dropping the ball here. I have become complacent. I have failed.”

Pinky: “I don’t really understand, Universe, but this Arma 3 game is boooooooooooring. Nothing ever happens, and then I lose– NARF. Oh, I know! It needs a dinosaur level.”

In this episode of Tales of the Unexpected, we learn that DayZ creator and lead Dean Hall plans to leave Bohemia by the end of 2014, in order to set up a new studio in New Zealand. The early access version of the multiplayer survival sim passed 1.5 million players this weekend and I don’t think it’s dropped out of the top three sellers on Steam since release, but Hall told Eurogamer that his continued presence would become a hindrance to the project:

…maybe I’ve got the gift of the gab, so I can talk, I can explain something, I can talk people up to the ledge and get them to jump off it. That’s what I did with DayZ; I’ve done it twice now – two new code teams have separately done it. But eventually, that’s the bad person to have. Eventually, you don’t want the guy telling you to go over the top and get through. So at some point I’ll be a disaster for the project, at least in a leadership role.

Bohemia have acknowledged the statement but declined to add comment. More details below.

People can finally play DayZ’s standalone alpha en masse, and so they have. As of Bohemia’s last count, the still ultra-buggy alpha had fallen into the ravenous hands of 875,000 players, which totals out to 8,750,000 fingers. Even rockstars who crowdsurf at every show can’t boast that. Despite that, the newly reborn undead survivor isn’t even close to finished – or out of alpha, for that matter. Keeping in line with the game’s appropriately shambly development cycle, DayZ’s beta won’t even kick off until the end of 2014. Don’t expect to see this one in any state resembling “finished” for quite some time yet.

Plenty of people who were veterans of the original DayZ mod had been wondering whether the magic of the original experience had survived the making of a standalone game. I’m pleased to report that not only has it survived, but there’s new magic, too. Rocket and his team know what they are doing, and the changes they’ve made have created some tense and terrible moments in this new game. The realism it strives for is simultaneously unreal and dark, and creates some of the most awkward and sinister roleplay situations I’ve experienced in any game.

OK, maybe those aren’t quite the real figures, but at some point these headlines just become giant neon “LOOK AT ALL THESE IMPRESSIVE NUMBERS” signs. That said, the DayZ alpha is definitely a sprinter, not a shambler, given that it raced to 172,500 copies sold (and counting) in only 24 hours. Maybe this whole zombie fad has a chance of catching on after all, despite the fact that fairies, goblins, and poofy haired troll figurines are massively outpacing them in the pop-culture-sphere-o-scape right now.

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Earlyaccessmas, which is the sort of buzzword holiday title that I probably deserve to be crucified for. But honestly, between Starbound, Wasteland 2, Elite: Dangerous, Blackguards, Dungeon of the Endless, and now DayZ, this is getting ridiculous. We are figuratively getting our Christmas presents early during actual Christmas. Someone must have planned it this way. That is the only possible explanation. Or everyone was just trying to capitalize on the December Dead Zone, because you can’t spell capitalize without capitalism. Wait. Never mind, just go below for a trailer and foreboding words from the DayZ team.

Once upon a time, “early access” meant “a glorified demo with maybe a few features toned-down or MIA.” These days, however, it’s increasingly become a legitimate look behind-the-scenes of the game development process, a chance (for better or worse) to pay a penny to give our thoughts. On one hand, it aids game development on multiple levels, but on the other, there’s ample room for abuse of the system. I cannot in good conscience discuss these things without offering that disclaimer, and neither, apparently, can DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall. In a recent forum post, he was quite upfront about it: DayZ Standalone will be a mess on day zero, and many of its new features might not blossom into full fruition for months to come.

Zombies are nothing if not decisive, single-minded creatures, but DayZ‘s standalone has proven to be anything but. After narrowing down a release date on multiple separate occasions, it recently ended up on the backside of another delay – having slipped on the diabolical banana peel that is unforeseen server infrastructure issues. It was only a matter of time, though, before it rose again, hungry for human gray matter and brain-stroking moral quandaries. Today(Z) is that day(Z). Kinda. The multiplayer survival dynamo has appeared as an Early Access game in Steam’s database, and Rocket’s once again optimistic about an impending launch.